The Pyramids of Lima

My first impression of Lima was not a good one. The Lima airport is located about 15 miles outside the city in what is essentially a desert where hundreds of acres of shipping containers and new cars sit behind chain-link fences. I flew into Lima at night and the first part of the taxi ride to my hotel made me wonder if I chose the best city to spend a few days during my annual border run. My cab passed obscure pods of people lurking on the shards of sidewalks in front of dimly lit fast food joints, gloomy bars, and tacky casinos. The side streets were even darker and more uninviting. The muted colors behind the dingy sidewalks and the scene’s atmosphere of unspoken desolation reminded me of some of Edward Hopper’s nightscapes. Yet, as the cab wobbled over broken streets toward my hotel, the city slowly started looking better and better. More and more trees had been planted and watered by someone. Soon the street lights became brighter, the streets smoother, and then widened into boulevards. Green, well-watered parks began to appear.

At a traffic light, a black Mercedes pulled up next to my cab. A well-dressed couple sat in the back studiously avoiding looking in my direction. As I stepped out of my cab at the Westin Hotel I looked up to see dozens of office buildings with well-lit signs of “Samsung”, “Interbank, and many of the other well-known multi-national firms gleaming from their roof-tops.
Stopping at the hotel’s lobby bar for a dark cerveza, I immediately noticed that I was not in Medellin anymore. The waitresses were demur. They spoke perfect English and didn’t have tattoos running up and down their arms. The next few days I walked around the area, and noticed other ways Lima differed from Medellin. There weren’t any homeless people rooting through garbage bins looking for recyclable items they could trade in for beer money. Why? Simply because there were no homeless people, and even more surprisingly, no trash. The streets and sidewalks were spotless. I saw no one dropping wrappers or anything else on the streets and sidewalks, and as a result, no one was cleaning up after them.
Unlike Medellin, I saw no young bucks blasting their un-muffled motorcycles through clearly red stoplights. Indeed, traffic, though heavy, moved along smoothly, almost effortlessly, with drivers showing great patience with the 120-second stop-lights. If you were walking on the sidewalk and you got within 3 feet of a crosswalk drivers would acknowledge you and slow down to see if you would step out onto the crosswalk. If you did, they would stop. You shared these sidewalks with many men in business suits heading into the magnificent corporate towers. No idiots were yelling to their friends across the street at the top of their lungs, “OYE!”, or more inexplicably, at total strangers. Nope, downtown Lima is nothing like Medellin. It is clean, well-ordered, and civilized. It was my idea of utopia, and with Medellin now appearing both shameful and shameless……yet….
Something didn’t feel quite right. It was a little too perfect to be true. I started noticing things that didn’t quite make sense. Where did all those thousands of office workers holding meetings and typing away in those office towers, where did they eat lunch? In a 5 block by 5 block square around my hotel, I counted only 1 Starbucks, 1 Subway, 1 Horneo, and a supermarket. Now that I think about it, where did the thousands of office workers in these high rises take their lunchtime break? Did they pack their lunches and eat at their desks? Surely some of them must want to go outside for fresh air during lunch. There are thousands of people working in these huge buildings, right?
Maybe not. Everything might not be as it first seems. There was a farmer’s/craft market a couple of blocks from my hotel. Nice crafts, great smelling food, a spotless plaza, but hardly any customers. Around the corner were high-end, glamorous stores with more sales clerks than customers. My hotel, the Weston, possessed 30 floors and its base took up almost a full city block, yet I never saw a line of people waiting to check in or out at the front desk. I think most of the rooms must have been empty.

It all felt like I had stumbled onto the movie set for “Pleasantville”. Everything looked and worked perfectly, but then I took a look behind the scenery and found…there was nothing there.

I’m not sure whether or not this is actually true. I was certain, however, that this type of perfection would not make for interesting photography. As a result, I ended up spending more time than I had hoped stuck in my room watching cable news which was terrifying or depressing depending on the news story, or hanging out at the hotel’s pool, which was hugely boring. How can some people possibly believe that spending a vacation sitting next to lukewarm, chlorinated water, while slowly poisoning themselves with alcohol can be fun?
I did manage to visit 2 pre-Inca archeological sites within walking distance of my hotel.

I brought back some interesting pictures and a sunburn which I will share online next week. (Not the sunburn! ).

On my first full day in Lima, I set out in the morning for the archeological site of Huaca Pucllana located only about two miles from my hotel.

It turned out to be a very cheerful walk. A cool breeze rolled in from the Pacific Ocean where a frigid current had been snaking its way up the South American coast from Antarctica. The sky was overcast, as it typically is for Lima. For me, the short walk was no sweat and no cap. I should have known better. That night I realized that a hidden sun can broil you just as badly as a bold-faced one.

My morning walk was through some of Lima’s most beautiful neighborhoods. I strolled by large mansions surrounded by green lawns and shady trees, which were in turn, surrounded by tall wrought iron fences. What made this district even more impressive was the realization that someone had to water every tree, every bush, and every blade of grass I saw. Rain is so rare in Lima that the city doesn’t have to install street drains. Most of my walk was along Avenida Arequipa, a large boulevard that sported two lanes of traffic on either side of a tree-lined mall split down the middle by a paved path used for jogging and biking. As I neared Huaca Pucllana, the little tourist map I was using confused me. I ended up almost completely circumnavigating the site before I found its entrance gate. It is a huge excavation! (See photo below).

Huaca Pucllana includes an immense pyramid that was used for ritual purposes and adjoining ruins that served as the hub for secular administrative activities.

These are not Inca ruins. All of Huac a Pucllana was built 1300 years before the Incas took over the area, and was abandoned after 500 years before the Incas arrived. The Inca didn’t have much time to build anything lasting in Lima, since Pizzaro landed only a few decades after they took over. (One reason Pizzaro was so successful was that the local tribes still retained bad feelings toward the Inca, and gladly showed Pizzaro the road through the mountains to Cuzco). So who are the people who built the pyramid? Are you ready for it? They are called “The Lima”. Is that what they called themselves? Maybe, maybe not.

I paid a small entrance fee and then waited for an English-speaking guide to gather a group of other English speakers together. While waiting for stragglers to arrive, I began asking her questions about the site, and she soon realized that I would be an annoyance. It was clear that I wouldn’t blindly accept everything she said. For example, I immediately noticed that the sun-dried bricks that formed the pyramid were sharply defined and unweathered. I asked her if the pyramid had been rebuilt by the archeologists. I pointed out that ruins in Mesopotamia were made out of the same type of sun-dried brick and had been reduced to mounds of earth when discovered and required some reconstruction to resemble their former selves. She said that this pyramid was not nearly as old as the ones in Mesopotamia and had been covered by sand blowing in from the ocean. She said archeologists had only to brush the sand away to reveal the sharp, unweathered brickwork (see photos below). I wasn’t buying it, and probably my face revealed my thoughts. Later in the tour, she indicated that the ruins had to be sprayed once a month with a chemical that prevented the humid sea air from deteriorating the brickwork. Later still, she said that most people didn’t know that the pyramid existed until relatively recently and that as late as the 1970’s, kids, believing it was a sand dune, were racing their dirt bikes up and down its sides. She glanced over to me as she said this. I think her original statement that there had been no damage to the pyramid that would require any reconstruction was the official line, and she was indicating that she knew better.

I continued to ask the guide questions as our group walked over and around the pyramid. The guide and I were developing a low-key love-hate relationship. None of my English-speaking compatriots raised any questions or demonstrated any curiosity about the ruins at all. Some drifted so far behind the guide that they couldn’t possibly hear what she was saying. I couldn’t understand why they even bothered to be there. Maybe they took some selfies with the pyramid in the background, but I didn’t see anyone even do that. I think she appreciated my interest in the site and the opportunity I gave her to go off-script, but it was also clear that I was not always accepting the official line that she was supposed to deliver. Most of her narrative, however, was very interesting and believable.

According to her, the religious purpose of the pyramid was similar to what motivated other early civilizations to create organized religions. These earliest religions were based on people’s need for food. The Lima priests combined a pragmatic function with a spiritual one. They not only spoke for the gods but also governed society and directed large-scale agricultural projects which they designed and/or managed as a secular leader would. They could determine when and where people could grow their crops by exercising the authority their religious status granted them and through their understanding of the seasons and other natural phenomena. Their religious rituals also promoted the sense of community and cooperation needed to create large public works projects such as irrigation ditches and the pyramid itself. Through the priest’s religious authority, the Lima people were able to grow enough food to feed a growing population, which in turn, led to bigger infrastructure projects, which led to more food, more people, and on and on. The religious rituals celebrated on the pyramid involved periodic feasts and, unfortunately, ritual sacrifices to guarantee the continued fertility of the soil and sea. It wasn’t a perfect system, but everyone thought it worked at the time.

Unlike in Hollywood movies, virgins were definitely not chosen as sacrificial victims. They were always older women who had already given birth to children. Perhaps the more children a woman had had, the more likely she would be chosen for sacrifice since she represented a fair exchange of fertility that the priests were requesting from the gods of nature. Every generation or so, the pyramid’s base would be expanded, a new platform built on top of the previous top, and a mother sacrificed. The pyramid grew, the population grew, the civilization grew, and everyone continued eating. But, of course, this couldn’t go on forever.

Eventually, the top of the pyramid became a cemetery for the secular elite rather than a place where abundance could be celebrated, or sacrifices made to keep the food coming. It was no longer used to ensure that enough food could be grown to support the community. The guide said that this change in the religious focus occurred when a people called the Wari replaced the Lima. I had my doubts that the change was the result of conquest. The Lima and Wari spoke the same language, and Wikipedia says that the two peoples lived in pretty much in the same area for hundreds of years. My guess is that the Lima and Wari were the same people, and the new use of the pyramid reflects more of an internal change in the structure of Lima society and values rather than an external invasion from the outside.

In one of the graves near the top of the pyramid, three babies were buried with the mummy of some leader.

The guide said the babies were executed to provide the leader with company in the afterlife. Clearly, the focus of this new religion had moved from this life in the natural world, (growing food, feeding people, creating a sense of community, and building projects for the common good), to a religion that focused on an afterlife, and that stressed the importance of an elite. Mummies and graves of common people are not found in this or in the other pyramid in Lima. If they were promised an afterlife, they didn’t expect to be preserved or to take anything or anybody with them.

More friction popped up between the guide and me after we had walked down the other side of the pyramid and stopped at a diorama someone had set up of two men cooking something in a large pot, (perhaps a ritual meal to be shared with the community). It doesn’t matter what it was supposed to be, because it was obviously wrong. At their feet were some votive statuary. I recognized one of the statues as being one that is often sold in Mexican souvenir shops. I turned to the guide and said, “Are these statues really Lima artifacts?’ She snapped back, “No, of course not, we can not expose actual artifacts to the weather and possible theft”. I thought, “Well why not create some authentic reproductions”, but said nothing because she looked agitated and…. worried. There was something else bothering her. I looked back at the diorama. There must be something wrong with it which she could not defend. “Yes, There’s something wrong with the clothes”, I thought. The ancient Egyptians did develop a blue dye that they used in their art and in some of their crafts, but they were one of the few ancient cultures to do so. The blue dyes we use today were developed by much more advanced cultures. Believe it or not, most ancient cultures did not even have a word for the color blue. They understood the color of the sky as being a shade of green. How the concept of the color blue came about is a chicken or the egg type of mystery. The word for blue, the idea of blueness, and the ability to manufacture blue color pigments are all interrelated, but the question of which of these came first doesn’t have a ready answer.

Well, in the diorama both men were wearing cotton robes with a blue stripe running around the middle. I pointed at the garments and said, ” The garments…” Before I could finish she said, “The Lima did not use any blue color in their clothes”. Clearly, someone had royally screwed up this diorama, and she was not going to defend them. Later it became apparent that she disagreed with many things about how the site presented its archeolog

upon part of the secular portion of the ruins so that wealthy diners could look over the rest of the ruins and some other dioramas while they ate lunch.

The archeology under the restaurant was probably permanently destroyed and lost forever. We stopped in front of the restaurant’s veranda where the guide pointed out how some of the brickwork there had been deformed by the digging equipment used to build the restaurant’s foundation. We sadly stared at the diners drinking their pisco sours inside, and then stepped through the gate located next to the restaurant.

I sincerely thanked the guide for her efforts to inform us as the rest of our group silently drifted away. I’m glad I don’t have to work as a guide in this place.

I will post 5 pictures of the next archeological site I visited the following day with a much shorter narrative next week. It was a self-guided tour which pleased me greatly, and I even made a friend.

On my second day in Lima, I visited another archeological site, Huaca Huallmarca.

It was closer to my hotel but I didn’t choose to visit it first because my hotel’s concierge told me Huaca Pucllana was more interesting and a better experience. Let me say before I get started that the concierge was badly mistaken. I loved the place!

This second pyramid was at least a hundred years younger than Huaca Pucllana, though both pyramids had been used simultaneously for hundreds of years. Huaca Huallmarca was probably built by the Wari since it was used exclusively as a cemetery.

Archeologists have already uncovered dozens of mummies that the Wari had seeded throughout the pyramid.

Like at Huaca Pucllana, I couldn’t immediately find the front gate, and almost completely circled the site before finding it. As I wound around the fenced-in excavations, I took several pictures of what I saw inside. I saw a man digging a hole near the pyramid’s base, and no one else.

When I finally reached the front gate, I found it locked. “Damn”, I thought. “I walked over here for nothing. The concierge was right”. I saw a guard standing several yards behind the gate and asked him if the site admitted visitors while people were still working on uncovering the site.

He walked over and eagerly said, “It’s open, come in.” He unlocked the gate and directed me to a small building a few hundred feet away. I looked inside an open window and saw a young bespeckled girl cruising the internet on her phone. My first thought was that she looked a bit like Velma Dinkley of Scooby Doo fame, or Daria Morgaendorfter from the tv show “Daria”. The girl looked up and seemed honestly glad to see me. She charged me a fraction of what I had paid the day before at the other pyramid, told me the ground rules about what I could and could not do on the site, and directed me to a small museum next to the ticket hut where I could gather some background information about the people who built the pyramid. I immediately noticed that she was very bright and spoke perfect English. She smiled and asked me where I was from, what I thought of Peru, etc. She was not a guide, just the ticket cashier, but I gathered from her demeanor that she was college-educated. Given Peru’s current economic problems, this was probably the best job she could locate after college.

In fact, there were no guides here. Tourists were unsupervised and expected to roam on their own, which is why I had to surrender my backpack to the cashier. (Otherwise, I could have walked off with a mummy or authentic pottery).

As I wandered around the pyramid, I saw only 4 other tourists.

She recommended I visit the small museum first, and I found it very complete despite its size. Among other things, it displayed all the equipment needed to card out cotton seeds, spin thread, and weave cotton cloth. On my way out of the museum and up the pyramid, I saw her standing outside her booth and asked her if the Lima or Wari grew cotton here in Lima. She said she didn’t know. After an hour of exploring, I stopped back at her booth to pick up my backpack and learned she had walked over to where the archeologist was working and had asked him if cotton had been grown near the pyramid. He told her the museum displayed items from not only the coastal Local area, but also areas much further inland and that no cotton was grown in the immediate area, but that cotton cloth was woven here.

The girl and I chatted for a while. She seemed to appreciate having some company, and I enjoyed the conversation, too. I thanked her and walked toward the gate, thinking that if I were 40 years younger, I’d have second thoughts about walking away so soon.